Avocado Toast with Garlic Butter Kimchi

2024-07-29

Here's a photo of what your toast might look like!
Big kudos to my friend for trying this recipe out, I hope it was edible.

Skip to the recipe section if you want to get baking and skip the backstory. This recipe might be needlessly complicating the platonic ideal of an avocado toast. That said, I'm all for reproducibility (in science and in food), so I'm writing it down.

Recipe

Ingredients

Avocado toast in its purist form comprises only two ingredients: avocado and toast, and maybe a sprinkle of salt and pepper, or whatever you might use to season the avocado. Because of its simplicity, there's so little external flavouring for the ingredients to hide behind. This is why it's especially important to get really high-quality ingredients for this toast.

Get the nice farmer's market sourdough, don't use kimchi you just picked up at Hmart (use the one that's been fermenting for who-knows-how-long at the back of your fridge), splurge on the nice butter, you can use it when you cook other stuff.

The measurements in this recipe are pretty much guidelines, I don't really think something as simple as avocado toast needs exact measurements. Butter, salt, garlic, kimchi, use whatever amount you want. Also, when I wrote "about the size of your entire hand" for the sourdough bread, I don't mean in terms of its thickness. The slice of bread should be thick, though, at least half an inch. This is because it needs the structural integrity to hold the butter, the avocado, kimchi, and egg.

Prep

Step 1: Garlic Butter

Set the cloves atop your cutting board and crush it with the flat side of your knife. This will liberate the clove of garlic from its peel and has the benefit of preparing it for mincing. Mince once, then scrape the minced garlic with the flat side of your knife against your cutting board, almost turning it into a paste. Repeat 2-3 times.

Roughly slice the spring onion. Add the minced garlic and spring onion to the room temp butter, and give it a good mix! Add salt to taste. Set aside for later.

Step 2: Soft-boiled Egg

There's nothing magical about this step. Bring water to a rolling (but not vigorous) boil in a pot. Gently drop in the egg, taking care to not crack the shell while doing so. You can use a slotted spoon for this. If you're a poor grad student like I am and don't have a slotted spoon or don't even know what that is, just use a regular spoon.

Set a timer for 6.5 minutes and go work on the other steps.

Once the timer is done, take the egg and move it to a bowl or cup with cold water, halting the cooking process and ensuring the egg yolk remains runny. Some people use an ice bath but I normally don't have ice cubes on hand. In fact, I don't even have an ice cube tray at home.

I recently substituted the plain egg with a gyeran-jorim egg (soy-braised egg). It was delicious, but it might go better with a standard avocado toast and not one that already has a ton of flavours, like this kimchi one.

Step 3: Kimchi

I really, really love kimchi. But I didn't eat it until I was in 5th or 6th grade, which is one of the great regrets of my life and a source of huge shame for my mom. That said, growing up as a third-culture kid, it was awkward at times for me to eat it with lunch at school. I'm glad that it's become a pretty commonplace ingredient, but that wasn't really the case when I was a kid.

Drain the kimchi and roughly chop it; you want discernible pieces of kimchi. You don't want the kimchi to be too watery, you can reserve some of the "kimchi water" for later if you want to reduce it in the pan with the garlic butter.

Add a small pat of the garlic butter to a pan, along with your kimchi. Fry until the desired consistency is reached. Add kimchi water to reduce, if desired.

Step 4: Toast Bread

Liberally butter both sides of the sourdough with the garlic butter, add butter to pan from before (or a new one, I don't care), and toast to your desired level of... toastedness?

Step 5: Assembly

I've gone to the end of this recipe without actually mentioning the avocado. Cut the avocado into halves, and remove the pit (do that thing where you remove it with your knife). You can either slice or mash the halves. I like mashing the halves because it's easier to spread onto the sourdough.

Take the slice of sourdough, and spread the avocado atop it, then spread the kimchi atop the layer of avocado. Peel the soft-boiled egg from earlier, and place it halved atop the layer of kimchi. Add salt and/or pepper, to taste, though it should be plenty flavourful, already.

Epilogue

I was never really a fan of avocado. Something about its grassy taste threw me off, especially when paired with the buttery component of its flavour profile. But then, I had it.

It was the first avocado toast I've had since a friend made me one at the first-year dining hall at UBC ("trust me, it's so good"). It was from 33 Acres Brewing, where I'd used to go with a bunch of my friends back when I lived in Vancouver. It was an avocado toast, comprising of very thickly-cut sourdough from Nelson the Seagull, one of my favourite bakeries in the city, feta cheese, radishes, cherry tomatoes, and a poached egg. All with a side of hot sauce artfully smeared across a plate that probably costs more than my entire collection of tableware (A fork, spoon, and one plate).

It was delicious. I was converted. From rejecting avocado and all it stood for (youthful decadence, financial irresponsibility, "You're never going to be able to afford a home with all that avocado toast!") to an avocado apologist; all within a few bites. All it cost me was my chance at home ownership and $19.90.

$19.90. I could make this shit at home, and it'll probably taste better, was the first thing I thought to myself with my typical arrogance after the last, glorious bite disappeared into my mouth. So I picked up a loaf of sourdough bread and three avocados (one for Clay, one for Sally — Clay's partner, and another for myself) on the way home from 33 Acres. I was set to fly back to New York the next afternoon. I'll make them avocado toast for breakfast.

I woke up to rain the next morning. The weather had been uncharacteristically nice for most of my stay in Vancouver. Clear skies, a cool breeze, and sunlight that smiled on my skin. I'd forgotten what summers back in the Pacific Northwest felt like, but the rain was what reminded me I was home. Rain that didn't carpet bomb the sidewalk and leave every part of me soaked through, to never be dry again. No.

Rain like an ambrosia mist from a garden hose reviving a parched garden in summer.

That's what home feels like.